The temptation is to use a on-line survey tool to save your time, but I think for your early customers a questionnaire may only give you the answers that you are looking for, not the information that you need. Conversation Works Best With Early Customers One on one conversation works best [...]
We have added Google's Search Co-op to our Resources page. As an entrepreneur, you need to dabble in so many fields. Some areas of expertise an startup needs are legal, accounting, funding, marketing, sales, public relations, recruiting, hiring, partners, and advisers. We work with some great experts and partners and [...]
I was doing some background research on Julian Fellowes after listening to his screenwriter's commentary on the Gosford Park DVD and came across three quotes that you may find useful as an entrepreneur. The first two are in response to Leilah Farrah's questions in an interview in the Wednesday June 25, 2003 edition [...]
Tonight I attended a KIN / KASE Event: VC Investment in Asia and What It Means to Korea. The guest speakers were Han Kim, Partner at Altos Ventures and Tae Hea Nahm, Partner at Storm Ventures. I have heard many VC's speak on how they evaluate investment opportunities and what [...]
Last night, I attended the SDForum Business Intelligence SIG. The guest speaker was Barry Klawans, CTO of JasperSoft who spoke on 2 Disruptive Trends: Open Source & SaaS. From Barry's talk I learned: The advantages vs. disadvantages of SaaS (Software as a Service) The similarities between SaaS and Open Source [...]
Clark Dong gave an interesting demonstration of a new action item tracking tool for startups called TaskPick at last night's SDForum Startup SIG. He came on after my show and tell on how and why we use Central Desktop in our practice. He was articulate and energetic and I was very impressed with his approach. [...]
Don't forget the dream to change the world that got you started: your passion is an important element of craftsmanship and a commitment to excellence. What's Your Passion? Recently, I chatted with a well-established consultant–she’s been working for more than a decade. She was having trouble developing a short elevator [...]
Greg Knauss wrote "An Entirely Other Day" sporadically from 1994 to 2006 (with five year or so gap between 2001 and 2006 and who knows, he may start up again). It's experiential blogging at its finest, with some sharp observations--some introspective--of work, marriage, children, illness, aging, and death. Experiential Blogging [...]
An excerpt from Soren Kierkegaard writing on helping others to understand. The key is to start from a deep understanding of the other person’s world view. This echoes Steven Covey’s fifth habit: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” […]
Is my topic this Thursday, February 15, at 7:00 PM, at the IEEE-CNSV meeting at KeyPoint Credit Union, 2805 Bowers Ave., Santa Clara, CA. The event is free. I will cover a number of practical suggestions for using blogs to promote a consulting practice and wikis to foster project team collaboration [...]
I attended FASTforward '07, this week. There were some very interesting talks: John Battelle, author of Searchblog: Search is a conversion. Search becomes a way to have a dialog with your customers. Interaction with your website should mirror a conversation. Batelle offered the New York Times site as an example of [...]
Another excerpt from William Feather's "The Business of Life" From page 262, an entry entitled "A Conservative Club." More than forty-five years ago a group of men...organized a club for men of common intellectual interest. It was agreed that the membership would be limited to thirty, and that twelve meetings [...]
Join other bootstrappers--startup CEO's, CTO's, and founders--for breakfast and discussion. We meet at different restaurants in Silicon Valley from 7:30-9AM, your only cost is your meal and a tip. Come compare notes on operational, development, and business issues with peers. If you are serious about your business and are open to [...]
Greg Knauss was a guest blogger on kottke last year and ended his two week stint with this observation on referential and experiential blogging: There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential. [...] The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and [...]
In “Perseverance Rewarded” William Feather offers some good advice for getting started. Many folks succeed because they don’t realize how hard it is to accomplish what they have set out to do (of course several orders of magnitude more fail). […]
The Annual Stanford Entrepreneurship Conference featured Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, as its keynote speaker. Ed gave a great presentation on lessons learned from structurally organizing a company for effective communication across its departments. In the beginning, Ed believed they had created a very strong culture at Pixar. [...]